Glamour gone wrong

The double shift has been given a make over. It is now glamorous, desirable. It is an inspiration and an aspiration...for the countless female viewers of YouTube Moms.

The YouTube Mom community is an emerging phenomenon. For those of you who have never heard of the term, imagine something like this:While browsing YouTube one day, you click on a video entitled "Day In the Life of A Mom." The video starts, accompanied by charming background music, and the shot fades into the image of a woman lying in a meticulously made bed in a bedroom that appears to have been furnished by the entire Martha Stewart catalog. She rolls out of bed, the alarm clock reading 6:00 AM, slips her feet into a pair of perfectly positioned slippers, and is off with her day. She goes from a "quick" and "effortless" make-up routine, to cooking an organic and locally-grown meal for her kids, to efficiently cleaning up the morning mess, to dressing in a "mom chic" outfit of the day, to sending her perfectly coiffed children off to school...I could continue, but the picture should be pretty clear by now. And all of the above, she accomplishes while holding a YouTube job: creating original content for videos, editing videos, managing corresponding social media sites, and creating an empire that feed's the viewer's appetites.

Don't worry. If you feel like this scenario sounds all too familiar, it is...just slightly modified to include a glamorous career on the side. Half a century ago, the prevailing standard of an ideal woman in America encompassed the roles of wife, mother, and homemaker. These roles were frequently glamorized in media, the most popular being advertisements geared towards women that promised the newest technology or invention that would surely elevate her domestic duties to the next level. In these advertisements, women are depicted as young, beautiful, slender, made-up, and well-dressed. To advertising agencies, they represented the ideal that all women should aspire to achieve. There is no reference to independence, to passions, to unique skills...only to vacuums, kitchen gadgets, and happy husbands.

In a similar manner, the "YouTube Mom" genre of videos is re-realizing the 1950's ideal of women's role in the home. In addition to the traditional domestic components, it is going above and beyond to portray a "have-it-all" scenario in which a woman can have a life in which family, career, and personal pursuits are perfectly synced. However empowering this concept may seem to the 21st century woman, it is also important to view it with a critical eye, as with any type of media consumption. Despite its deviation from the 1950's ideal, this new genre is still promoting a singular standard as the ideal to which all women aspire. Any time one standard is promoted as the ideal above all standards, there are dangerous consequences. By promoting the "have-it-all" woman, we also bring down the woman who is financially tied to her day job, the woman who decides that she does not want to have children, and the woman who took a step back from her career in order to focus on other pursuits.